Letters to the editor: May 8

A city accessible to all

Mayor Pike, when are you going to make St George ADA accessible for everyone? To ride wherever we need to go your sidewalks need to be ramped at every beginning and the ramps that are attached to the sidewalks are not up to code. Also, we sure could use bike walks for mobile chairs and bikes. How about the crosswalk on the side streets? It would be great to have crosswalk flags on each side for the Dixie students. Also, the light walk buttons need to be where we can reach them. It would also be great to have the walk boxes to be able to talk so that the blind can know when it is safe for them when to cross. I'm not wanting to get told by you that it cost money cause we are just as important as anyone else in this town. If anyone is wanting this as much as I am, then please let Mayor Pike know how you feel.

Ruth Barrow

St. George

Your neighbor's electric car

The Spectrum published a ridiculous op-ed on April 22nd by CFACT, an organization funded by the coal industry to encourage inaction on climate change, entitled “Your neighbor’s electric car could be costing you money.” Actually, the opposite is true: your neighbor’s electric vehicle, and clean energy to charge it, will save money, and much more. The article’s complaints (manufacturing quotas and tax support) and false claims (even dirty coal-based charging results in 20% less emissions than gasoline) completely miss the point: we must accelerate our move away from fossil fuels. Most of the cost of carbon fuels is not included in the price: it’s in our health care and disaster relief, and in our grandchildren’s costs for future impacts to food and water supplies, world-wide migration and instability. Our scientific institutions, the DoD, many conservative organizations, even our state government and Big Oil agree. We need to move to electric vehicles and to clean energy. The longer we take, the more painful it will be. A Carbon Fee on fossil fuels returned to consumers as a Dividend can get us there: energy independence, local energy production, revenue-neutral, bipartisan, boosting innovation and jobs. Let’s do it.